Familiarity breeds contempt. Intellectually Christianity is the small town in which I grew up. The first impulse of any teenager raised in a small town is to count the days until he can escape. I was no different. My senior year of high school, I took a college writing course after school. One day after class, I complained to my professor about how boring life and people were in Myrtle Point. Fortunately, my professor was also a poet and saw my failure of imagination. The next class he gave me a copy of Winesburg, Ohio a collection of stories by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson writes about the characters of a fictional small town and captures their weird, wonderful, and tragically grotesque reality. Anderson made me see that people, even the most ordinary, are extraordinarily complex and endlessly fascinating. Winesburg, Ohio awakened me to the danger of pride blinding me to the wild beauty of the familiar. I saw the familiar with new eyes.
One summer during college I decided to read all the major novels of William Faulkner. Here too Faulkner, writing from Oxford Mississippi, records the dignity and flawed humanity of ordinary people. At the urging of Gertrude Stein, Faulkner had returned from Paris to write about the place he knew: rural Mississippi. One can debate how much in his novels are perceptions of reality and how much are creations, or perhaps how many are imaginative recreations of true perceptions. But in the familiar, he found depths of human experience and earned a Nobel Prize.
I found all these fictional works arguments for incarnation—for the majestic and most noble taking on flesh and living among us. The ordinary could contain the wonder and mystery of life. Chesterton puts all this in words in his book Orthodoxy where he writes elegantly of the romance of orthodoxy. My hunger for wonder and mystery did not require my rejection of Jesus. Although I went on to read widely and examine eastern religions and even Native American shamanism, the merely exotic lost its allure. I did not feel obliged to regard my Christian faith with contempt just because it was familiar. The meanest shepherd’s shack could shelter mystery and beauty beyond measure. These writers challenged me to see the biblical narrative as that trunk from which every other narrative branches—to see it as the true narrative of which every imagined narrative is a shadow.
In my journey of faith rediscovery has been as important as discovery. I now see that many who wander away from their faith lack, or have not yet had, such moments of rediscovery: the times when we see Scripture and Jesus from a radically new perspective. Without such rediscoveries, my faith could not have kept pace with my reading and experiences. Having the eyes of my heart opened, and reopened, has kept me moving toward Jesus and high adventure.
